


In the Blood

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Wire in the Blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-20
Updated: 2006-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:22:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carol Jordan learns to embrace her profession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Blood

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES: Takes place after the events of the fourth book in the series, "The Torment of Others," with borrowed elements from the TV series "Wire in the Blood" and also random bits from the HBO series "Dexter," but it's in no way a crossover. The fandom in the Yuletide archive is for the TV series and my recipient asked for something in book series canon. So, I went out and read the four books in the series! I'm not sure what would have been easier, in hindsight, but the books were great, and I hope I've done the characters a small amount of justice.
> 
> Written for Ceridwyn2

 

 

Carol Jordan's life was hell.

She ruminated on why this was so on her way home. She analysed the facts of her life and reached the necessary conclusion. She lived in some sort of ninth circle of hell where crime and its acolytes had invaded every aspect of her life; its crud seeping into every corner.

Carol lived with violence. She had few friends outside of the office. She had an unrequited love with a man who reminder her of the ugly past and she did the same for him. There was the daily guilt of things not done in time, lives hanging in the balance and people depending on her to find that tiny invisible clue or connection to save them. And all the failures that followed.

She'd moved from her basement flat below the man who she most wanted to be near, in favor of a tiny, unfulfilling flat that left her with a long commute, and too much time in the car to think.

She entered her flat and slipped onto her knees in a fresh pool of blood. Her hands sunk down into the gore, her mind registering what she was seeing even as she shook her head in disbelief.

Her half-gasped screams were near-silent and her hands barely shook. Shock rolled over her, chasing panic down. She rolled her head from side to side, still enough instinct left in her to check for the man, the murderer - _the violator_ \- to see what was in store for her. No one was there, not even the mutilated corpse she expected. Surely this much blood required the presence of a corpse.

Blood soaked down into the carpet, it felt sticky and warm on her knees. Stains blossomed up her trousers. Blood was splashed on the wall, like a grotesque attempt at a Pollack.

Her first thought was to call Tony. She called Paula McIntyre instead. The woman's sure voice was what she needed - a voice that understood well the sheer terror of vulnerability.

***

"Who are you?" Dr. Tony Hill asked, looking into the mirror above his sink. He wasn't just asking himself. He was thinking primarily of the sort of person - a man, he knows this - who would target Carol Jordan. Who would want to terrorize her, taunt her, traumatize her? Who would save the blood of his victims - and there were five, _five_ different blood types in that mess - and who would then splash it around her apartment?

"What sort of message are you sending?" Tony drew his razor down the side of his face, careful not to nick himself in the process. More than once he'd been so distracted by a patient or a case that he'd given himself a cut and further encouraged his colleagues to look at him as unkempt and easily distracted.

"A copper has no shortage of enemies," Tony continued to his reflection, "What did Carol do to you to bring you to this sort of carefully planned and excessively risky stunt?"

His reflection had no immediate answers.

***

Carol hated the fog. It closed in on her, lumbering forward, pressing at the doors. It seemed always to be trying to get inside her head.

Paula's spare room was clean. There was not a trace of the late Don Merrick anywhere, and for that she was grateful. By afternoon the fog had turned into a drizzle and the light had all but give up trying to penetrate it. Carol had never felt this depressed since the weeks after the rape when the world was a giant black hole. It was an unwelcome feeling.

She reached to pull back the lanky beige drapes on the spare room's only window. Might as well try to get as much natural light as the sky grudgingly allowed.

Carol stretched out on the neatly made bed and watched the dusk approach. She must have been more tired than she realized as when she next opened her eyes, it was dark, a hazy orange glow from the streetlights reflecting off the fog and illuminating shadows. Something seemed to be in the yard that wasn't there before. Something or _things_ were hanging in the air, or from the tree. Carol rubbed her eyes and stood up, her legs unsteady beneath her.

The window was ice cold under her fingertips and she inhaled at the surprise of seeing what was not just her tired eyes playing tricks. Items were suspended on thin ropes from the branches of Paula's tree. One of the shapes revealed itself to be a hand, another shape was a foot, and when the severed head slowly twirled on its axis, a face was revealed.

Carol stumbled back and away from the window with a shout. It was deja vu as she fumbled for the phone, this time calling John Brandon first. He kept her on the phone while he dispatched a squad to the house, and he told Carol it would be alright. He said that the perpetrator could not have escaped notice in Paula's neighborhood; he would certainly be caught this time. Carol didn't believe him, but she needed to hear it all the same. It's exactly what she would have said to someone else in the same position.

As it was, the terror was slowly making its way back into her brain, filling it up with the kind of fog that she'd fought so hard to clear away.

The next thing she knew, she was standing up and Tony's arms were around her. Paula was there, efficient and official despite the fact that it was now _her_ home that had been violated. It was clear that the one responsible for this was out to get Carol, not Paula, and Carol shuddered at the thought that there was really nowhere for her to go to feel safe. She thought she might never feel safe again.

She buried her face in Tony's shoulder and told herself she deserved at least that.

Later, in Tony's cold bed, she listened to the sounds he made as he prepared for sleep on the pull-out couch. Or, for the kind of long night like she was about to have.

"Fuck this," Carol muttered and threw back the covers. She wrapped an old quilt around her shoulders, shuddering as a wave of Tony's scent enveloped her.

"If you're going to work this case all night, you'd better own up to it and let me help. I won't be sleeping tonight," Carol said, startling Tony who was standing by the window.

"You're more help to me after a good night's sleep, Carol," Tony said softly.

"It's no use."

"Then let me make some tea."

Carol let Tony fuss around in the kitchen while she went to his desk to face her demons. Photos of her bloody apartment lay face up on the desk, but Tony had flipped over the flash-bright shots of the body parts. Carol flipped them back and stared at the hands, feet, head and torso, neatly wrapped in cellophane, packaged as a gift to her.

Tony came back with two hot mugs of tea and she wrapped her hands around it gratefully.

"You know they are going to go through your life with a fine toothed comb to see what turns up," Tony said in his pleasant way.

"Yes. I have nothing to hide. The worst of it is already in the public domain at any rate."

They returned to the photos. The body parts, each one from a different corpse, hung like Christmas ornaments from the tree. They were pink and bloodless. "He drained the blood from his victims," Tony said. "Precision and control are his watchwords; he is obsessive with details and he doesn't like things messy. The wrapping is neat and professional. Maybe he once worked in a butcher shop or even a gift-wrapping booth."

"You're kidding," Carol said dryly, though she didn't think Tony was kidding at all.

"He also has an artistic touch," Carol noted, running her finger along the photograph of a tight bow tie on the right hand of a woman. She didn't know who this woman was, but she felt the familiar clench around her heart as she vowed to find out. "This, this is his art."

"Yes, and his art has a message," Tony continued. "It also has a target audience." Tony moved to the chair next to Carol and pulled up close to her. She let him, let herself breathe in the comfort his nearness gave her. "His target audience is Carol Jordan. A woman, a cop, no shortage of enemies, like all cops, but he's trying to bait you in particular. We need to find out why."

"Each body part is so carefully wrapped," Carol said. "What is the message there? Meat is murder?"

"Murder is your calling, Carol. Who might want to see you recognize this?"

"Who has more interest in me than I feel I deserve?" She asked. "Who has the means to do all this?" She gestured at the elaborate tableau in front of them." The killer had ample time and space to kill, dismember, exsanguinate and preserve his victims. Not your average punter in a low-rent flat."

"He wants to impress you," Tony said, looking straight at her. Carol thought for just a split second - a fragment of a thought, really -- that the killer was Tony himself, before she laughed out loud. The idea of Tony doing this, despite his oddity, was more than ludicrous. But there it was. She loved a man who had a little bit of the psychopath in him.

***

The chase was over well before it had even begun. Carol's team had only half-begun their routine questioning of everyone she'd ever known when the man responsible for her torment was sitting square in the interview chair. She was stunned and relieved. She couldn't believe her good luck. This time, things had gone her way before lives were damaged and lost.

She finished up her paperwork at the station and sat in her car for long moments before starting it up and driving away. There was no hesitation; she headed straight for Tony's flat. She'd picked up her bags earlier from Paula's. There was no way in hell she would ever live in the new flat - she would always envision it covered in blood. She couldn't stay at Paula's - for the same reasons, plus it made her think too much about Don, wondering what thoughts went through his mind during his last few weeks. That made her very uncomfortable.

Tony hadn't wanted her to leave the basement flat. And now she wondered why she felt she had to. Because he wasn't trying to sweep her off her feet? That wasn't his way.e's He had confessed his shortcomings and if there was any hope for them, she had to accept them.

He had a big glass of white wine waiting for her when she walked in the door.

"I could get used to this," she said, and meant it.

"So, tell me," Tony began, as they settled themselves on the couch. "Business first. How did this happen?"

"You wouldn't believe it unless you were there, Tony. He walked right into the station. He had a "flower" arrangement for me. Only the flowers were made of glue and human intestines. One particularly exotic flower was a kidney."

Tony was incredulous. Then he began to smile as Carol's jittery nervousness gave way to laughter. "I can't believe it. I can't wait to interview him myself. What an interesting mind he must have."

"It's one for the books, I'm telling you. He was a morgue assistant in London and apparently fell for me when I worked at the Met. He's been passionately pining for me for years, waiting until I settled down somewhere in order to court me."

"Just your type, is he?" Tony leaned back and the lines around his eyes crinkled into the friendly smile Carol loved.

"Round, bald, small mouth, pinkish skin, sexual dysfunction. Yes, Tony, he's right up my alley."

"I see," he replied, scratching his head. "I've got a razor, thank God."

"Very funny. Do you want to hear the rest or not?"

"Yes, yes, go on."

"I actually came down to the front desk when reception rang me to say there was a delivery for me. I didn't even think twice. Then I saw him, and I had a funny feeling. When I looked into the bag he was holding and saw the intestinal arrangement, I knew."

"He fancied you fancied him, did he?"

"Yes, he thought we were meant to be and that I had understood his little works of art and appreciated them. He had plane tickets to somewhere and figured we'd go off together."

"And the bodies? You said they were from a morgue?"

"Yes. Yes, I'm grateful, more than grateful. No one was killed in the enactment of his sick fantasies. He took several bodies one at a time, over the course of all these years, and stored them neatly in his meat locker at home. Waiting for the right moment. Letting his art mature. It feels funny to repeat the things he was going on about."

"I'm glad, Carol, really glad, that this is over. No harm to anyone. No harm to anyone but you. I want you to know I am here for you. I always am."

If they had been any other man and woman, with such a strong attraction between them, they might have kissed, or at least embraced passionately. But this was Dr. Tony Hill, and Carol knew it wasn't going to be easy. She set down her wine and pushed it away with a finger.

"Tony," she began. "I'm not normal. Not anymore. Not after what's happened to me. My life has been filled with violence. I've been violated in so many ways. I've lost a lot."

Tony nodded sagely. She knew that he wasn't unaffected by any of it. Not by Don Merrick's death, not by what she had had to endure, and all this on top of his own terrifying experiences at the hands of murderous psychopaths. And still he came back day after day, just like she did, because he was good at it. He couldn't live without it.

"We can't live with ourselves if we don't do what we were meant to do. And it's painful," Carol continued, watching Tony's face. She had a surprise for him, but she wanted to make sure he was ready. She knew that she was.

"So I want to move forward," she said carefully. "We live with the darkness, and for the most part, we're each going to need to live our own lives. No fairytales, Tony."

He stared at her, and she knew he was processing everything, jumping ahead to the inevitable conclusion, anticipating her moves, _profiling_ her.

"I think we should let it in. Let ourselves have some release. We deal with sickos all day. I think we should try to take back some of it for ourselves."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. The look on Tony's face was unreadable, but he didn't flinch, and that was a good sign.

"I have issues with sex because control was taken from me. You have issues with sex because you're afraid to disappoint, afraid that you're a monster.

"I want to take that all away, Tony."

Tony cleared his throat but no words came out.

"Stand up, Tony." Carol was surprised and grateful when he did. She backed him toward the bedroom, keeping the handcuffs in sight. "I'm in control, so you don't have to worry about hurting me. You don't have to worry about disappointing me, because I'll do what I want. I have to trust you, Tony, and you have to trust me."

"This is rather unorthodox," he said. "It's not really like you, Carol."

"I'm not really like the sort of person who gets a bouquet of human kidneys either," she said. "I'm not the sort of person who can live with the constant terror that I'm going to lose myself or the people I love. I hate vulnerability. That's why you're going to put the handcuffs on me tomorrow night."

"You want to take the perversion in our professional lives and move it into our personal lives?" Tony had reached the bed and miraculously, he was laying down on it, kicking off his shoes in the process.

"I want to turn it inside out, yes," she said. "We spend too much time climbing out of our professional heads to try to be normal during regular hours. That man could have killed me instead of leaving me morbid gifts. I would have regretted not sleeping with you if he had."

"The clock is ticking," Tony said, following her train of thought with the precision that only he was capable of. He stripped himself of his shirt and trousers and lay down again on the bed. "I suppose that we ought to try it, just as when we're desperate, we try many avenues of thought, in order to catch our killer. Giving up the pretense of normality is an interesting way to start this investigation." He had a wry grin on his face, but his eyes were smiling.

"I thought you'd agree," Carol said. She had hoped, actually. She handed the cuffs to Tony so he could ensure he was comfortable. He clicked off the bedside lamp.

She turned around and closed the door.

 


End file.
